Posts Tagged ‘Middle Management’

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of Komen’s funding of Planned Parenthood, rarely do we get such a public example of a personal agenda being pushed to the detriment of the organization, which is why it’s our topic for discussion today.

As humans, we make sense of our world through story. In other words, we create a reality for ourselves that doesn’t exist, in reality.

I attended a workshop last weekend with Human Change Technology Expert, S. Lane Pierce, and he cited Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience who theorizes that we are bombarded with two million bits of input each second, and we process about 126 of them. We do that through a process of deleting, distorting and generalizing.

When I first got my Saint Bernard, Ponca, the biggest behavioral challenge we had was that she beat the other two dogs up. Bloodfang and Knight, the existing members of Team Dog, didn’t understand her boundaries and rules because their rules were different. One rule on Team Dog was that water is an infinite, shared resource because Alpha Dog kept them fully supplied.

Update: Col. McCraw from DPS did respond to my email. The short version is that the mental and physical demands tend to weed out a portion of the new hires, and they are studying other reasons why trainees leave in the first year.

I was watching a news story the other night about Texas DPS. Seems that 21% of their trainees are leaving DPS, and one of the reasons cited was that the pay isn’t competitive.

Powerpoint doesn’t kill brain cells…. people kill brain cells. Much like a gun and its ability to harm, Powerpoint provides a very effective method for making people stupid.

Here’s why – it provides the means and mechanism for dumping (some might call it vomiting) lists of facts (bullet points) all over the audience. This is not an effective way of disseminating information or learning. First and foremost, it’s boring. Boredom shuts down the brain. And, real learning requires involvement in the experience. Which means that it requires an experience.

As a managewhich, one of the more frustrating challenges is dealing with people who do not play nicely together in the sandbox. Most of managewhich’s deal with it in one of three very ineffective ways:

Ignore it, and hope it goes away.

Do their best to separate them, so that there is minimal disruption to the team and the work product, and then we have to all ignore the hostility elephant in the room.

Principle #3 in Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles is “Decide What You Want.” This, folks, is your vision. What do you want to be, do and have? My corollary on that is “Who do you want to be?” or maybe it’s “Who do you have to be to do and have what you want?”

Have you guys ever noticed how a lot of what I yap about here on the blog about business really translates back to life? If you haven’t noticed, then I want to highlight the point today.

One of the books on my shelf is The Power of TED (again, thank you Ken Abrams for turning me onto that), which is where I first learned of “The Dreaded Drama Triangle.” As a human effectiveness expert, the description of the drama triangle quoted from their book’s website made perfect sense to me:

I haven’t written about my journey on the success principles in three months (oh my goodness!!!), and this is a good illustration about how time passes without forward movement. In other words, a vision without any action is a dream. To be fair and honest, I am doing between one and five things every day towards my big hairy goal, and my goal is aligned with my vision. In other words, I’m not just chasing the shiny thing.